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Evolution, Creation, and Why Kirk Cameron Stinks
By Mark | March 12, 2007
This column will appear appeared in the Georgetown Law Weekly on March 20, 2007.
Before coming to law school, I was a paleontology graduate student at the University of Michigan. I studied, specifically, the life and migration of woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius), and in retrospect was much, much cooler than torts. One thing we used to encounter when we taught undergraduates was the occasional question about the “controversy” surrounding evolution. Those were valid questions, and I’m really happy that students were asking. We were always happy to talk about the issues, and not a one of us was anti-religion; the graduate students in my lab consisted of one Jewish student, one Mormon student, and yours truly, the token Roman Catholic. Since coming to Georgetown, I’ve found that many fellow law students are unfamiliar with the terms and concepts of evolutionary biology, so consider this column a little primer. I will make the same points here that I made then, and please don’t hesitate to email me if you’d like to discuss it further.
There is no “controversy” within the scientific community. While there is a political and cultural controversy regarding the theory of evolution by natural selection, there is no such debate within the scientific community. To be sure, there are debates, such as: What is the rate of evolution in genus X? What is the appropriate way to include the age of fossils when grouping species? No one who has studied biology at the organismal and ecological level believes that evolution is up for debate. 
Well, that’s not true; there have been a few well publicized people who have scientific degrees who doubt the veracity of evolution by natural selection, such as the Discovery Institute’s much-ballyhooed list of 300+ scientists who question evolution. In response, the National Center for Science Education published a list of over 600 scientists named Steve (or some variation thereof) who defended the scientific merit of evolutionary theory. The thing to remember is that there are very, very few people who object to evolution by natural selection on purely scientific grounds. Not that there is anything wrong with having a firmly held faith, but many of the objections are rooted in an individual’s particular conception of God and life. This is a valid and reasonable viewpoint, but it is not a scientific one.
Evolution does, in fact, occur via processes outside of natural selection. You’ll note that I’ve referred to “evolution by natural selection” instead writing simply “evolution.” Why is that? It is because natural selection is only a part of evolutionary theory, albeit a large and significant part. Natural selection, in a nutshell, is the idea that individual organisms that are fitter for the environment that they encounter during their lifetime will survive and reproduce more. If the traits that made them fitter are heritable, then the offspring of those individuals will be more fit as a group than offspring of individuals that did not, assuming that the environment didn’t change significantly. Makes sense, right? That’s why bacteria are becoming resistant to penicillin; the ones that are killed less, for whatever reason, reproduce more, and pass on what resistance they have on to the next generation. The funny thing is that there are other sources of genetic change than natural selection, such as the founder effect. That is the idea that if a small group of individuals found a community and are isolated from the main population, then some traits that are passed on are strongly affected by random chance and less by fitness. For example, the rate of albinism is very high amongst the Kuna people, who live on islands off of the coast of Panama. The odds are much more likely that the rate of albino births is more a factor of the small population and the genetic makeup of the founders than that albino men and women have a distinct advantage in survival and reproduction. 
There is also sexual selection, whereby individuals choose mates based on criteria that do NOT help with survival. For example, male peacock plumage is probably not too useful in hiding from predators; female peacocks (called “peahens“) are brown and plain, comparatively. The driving force for peacock plumage was in large part female choice. This is why evolutionary biology is more than just examining who lives and who dies; one of the genres of evolutionary research is the examination of the relative strength of the different forms of selection in the development of a trait or species.
Evolution does not tell us what constitutes a good life. Evolutionary biology does not have a thing to say about what makes someone a good person, whether or not there is a soul, or what makes up a life well lived. This is the fallacy that both defenders and opponents of evolutionary theory often forget. Science helps tell us how things work, not what we should do with that knowledge. The error of the “social darwinists” and the eugenicists is in thinking that morality and ethics can or should be explained by purely material processes; rape (termed “forced copulation”) exists in the natural world in many species, but that should never be used as a justification in a human society. Conversely, the error of anti-materialists is in thinking that a lack of moral or spiritual message makes the theory of evolution or other material explanations untenable. The planets revolve around the sun, the center of the earth is filled with a iron and nickel core, and species evolve via natural selection; none of this means that there is no place for spiritual, philosophical, or moral questions. God can still love us even if we figure out how the world works.
Mark Nabong should stick to mentioning his personal flaws. He can be reached at Mark@ChicagoTypewriter.net and his blog can be found at ChicagoTypewriter.net.
Additional Reading
Scientific American: 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense
TalkOrigins: Exploring the Creation/Evolution Controversy
Wikipedia: Evolution and the Roman Catholic Church
The Panda’s Thumb: My favorite evolution vs. creationism blog.
The Funhouse Mirror of Intelligent Design: Leaving aside the hostility towards religion vacuus misericordia, this is an excellent essay.
Topics: Science / Evolution, Religion, Law, Georgetown | Trackback | Comments RSS
March 13th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
You forgot to say why Kirk Cameron sucks.
March 13th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Kirk Cameron was a red herring.